Denver Dev Blog » Ajax

Bespin, the Mozilla Web Based Editor

Matthew McCullough — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 06:01:41 +0000

Mozilla has just released a web based programmer’s editor that runs entirely in your browser. It is aptly named Bespin, because it runs entirely in the cloud. Skeptics beware, this has the potential to blow your mind. A quick review of the screencast shows of the power and possibilities that a web based editor is strategically poised to execute. Collaborative editing. Collaborative code review. Plugins. Borrowing someone else’s setup of plugins. A developer’s mind quickly pants with excitement for this to move from alpha to beta as soon as possible. Go Dion!

Appcelerator at DOSUG

Matthew McCullough — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 05:55:00 +0000

Matt Quinlan of Appcelerator visited the Denver Open Source Users Group for our October meeting and gave a great presentation on how Appcelerator is an abstraction layer from your choice of backend web service provider (Java, PHP, ruby, .Net) and also provides a tag library that gives you access to the best of Prototype, JQuery (coming soon), YUI, Scriptaculous, and more.

The best part is how easy it is to try out Appcelerator. Just load up this page and start playing. You’ll be hooked in no time and ready to download the SDK installer for your platform of choice.

JQuery bridges the Open Source / Java / Microsoft Divide

Matthew McCullough — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 23:22:00 +0000

JQuery is, in my opinion, the most unique JavaScript libraries in terms of being able to modify content on-the-fly. One such incredibly useful example that I’m able to apply often, is adding PDF icons and _newwindow targets to all URLs with .PDF as an extension on all pages in a site without ever touching the source of the pages themselves, but rather just on one common include page.

Well, this library just got a major injection of Redmond steroids by the announcement, by way of Dion Almaer of Google, that Microsoft will be adding it to its standard development platform. Scott Guthrie has a quick demo of IntelliSense integration with JQuery in the ASP.NET toolset.

It’s neat to see technologies such as Hibernate, ORM, and Linq or actual implementations, such a JQuery in this case, span the borders to what I consider the three development realms – Open Source, Java and Microsoft.